


self-determined

by demonprodigy



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst (But Not About Being Trans), Backstory, By a trans author, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Pre-Canon, Trans Felix Hugo Fraldarius, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-13
Updated: 2019-10-13
Packaged: 2020-12-14 19:09:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21020801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/demonprodigy/pseuds/demonprodigy
Summary: Felix comes to terms with beingFelix.





	self-determined

**Author's Note:**

> take care that this piece uses she/her pronouns for felix until he figures out that he's transgender; if that bothers you, don't read on! this was based on my own personal experience - i think of myself, at certain ages between the time i became aware that my perceived gender had an effect on how people saw me in, like, kindergarten, and the time i realized i was trans, as a girl (or at least, someone trying very hard to be one) and would use those pronouns if i was to refer to myself during those years. also, this probably plays pretty fast and loose with canon - i need to replay blue lions route for exact details on a lot of things.
> 
> this will _probably_ get a chapter 2.

She’s ten years old when her brother walks in on her cutting her hair on the edge of a dagger. Jagged chunks of indigo fall to the floor around her boots, rough and uneven; she’s aware, somewhere in the back of her mind, that there’s no way she’ll come out of this looking anything  _ but  _ ridiculous, but still she saws away at the choppy locks still hanging past her cheeks.

“What on earth are you doing?” Glenn asks, and she nearly slices her own finger off dropping the dagger in surprise. She hadn’t heard the door creak, the footsteps entering the room.

“Cutting my hair. What does it look like I’m doing?” she snaps, before the wave of guilt hits - Glenn had only been  _ asking _ , after all.

“I can see that,” Glenn says, flicking a bit of hair away from her forehead, “but  _ why _ ?”

She’s not, to tell the truth, entirely sure. She’d just been… sick of it. Every time the ends of the dark blue waves have brushed her shoulders, she’s been uncomfortably aware of the sensation. She wears it up and out of her face, usually, but she can’t exactly sleep like that, and every time she passes her mirror on a nighttime walk for a glass of water, the long-haired stranger in the reflection startles her:  _ who the hell is- is that supposed to be  _ me _ ? _

And it just seems so much  _ easier  _ for her male friends, with their shorter cuts - Sylvain can practically tumble out of bed without so much as a glance at a brush, and he looks  _ fine _ . Dimitri’s never had to worry about the knots a rougher mock battle in the courtyard might leave in  _ his  _ blonde locks. Glenn wears his hair long, though tied up, but most of the Fraldarius men do (and have for quite some time, judging by the ancestral portraits she passes every morning on the way to the kitchens) and it’s not as if there’s any expectation that he learn the latest fashions in braiding or even keep it particularly neat. She envies them their bare necks, their ability to run their hands through their hair and  _ not  _ worry about the resulting cowlicks. And so here she is, the product of years of careful brushing and shampooing at her feet.

“It was too much trouble,” she says, finally, scuffing her toe against the ground and grimacing. It’s not a lie, but somehow, she can’t meet Glenn’s eye anyway. “I was tired.”

“I don’t want to be a jerk, but-”  _ Ha, _ she thinks,  _ how many people have you said that to and meant it? _ Glenn’s well-known for being blunt - but she lets her brother continue. “You look like a mess, little sis.”

“I know, and also? I still hate when you call me that. I’m ten, not  _ five _ .”

“Still little to me.” He ruffles her hair - what’s left of her hair - and bends to pick up the dagger as she sticks her tongue out. “At least let me even it out some. Make you look a little less like you got ambushed by bandits.”

“It does  _ not  _ look that bad.” Although, glancing back at the mirror - it kind of  _ does _ . She crosses her arms, sighing. “But if you’re gonna insist…”

By the time Glenn’s done, she looks something resembling presentable, at least. She runs a hand over the newly bare back of her neck, feeling the short hair at its nape ruffle under her fingers; when she turns her head, she’s unused to its  _ lightness _ . Somehow - despite the fact that she’ll undoubtedly be grounded to her room and some hideous needlework project or essay on Faerghean government structure once the rest of the family gets a look at her - she feels a thousand times more free.

<strike> **\--** </strike>

Things go to shit politically when she’s twelve, and so she spends a lot of time alone. Sylvain’s old enough to gain a seat at the table when the adults are discussing the king’s controversial new reforms, and even if he wasn’t, he’s been too distracted with girls ( _ other _ girls, the kind who clearly got some rulebook to womanhood handed to them that she’s missed out on) the past few years to be great company. Dimitri’s family rarely visits, and when they call upon House Fraldarius, it’s solely Glenn and her father who make the journey across the cold North to the capital. Ingrid’s hardly around, either. It all leaves her with a lot of empty hours to fill, so she spends them in the castle library.

She starts with the books of fables she grew up on, but the nostalgia the stories conjure up - she can so easily imagine the days when King Lambert would read them to her and Dimitri, the two of them sharing a blanket by the fireplace - isn’t a source of comfort so much as of disgust with herself, and the long-winded tomes of epic poetry are nearly unreadable. (Faerghus isn’t exactly known for its great creatives. Prolific, maybe, but not  _ great _ .)

What ends up taking up most of her time is the library’s historical section - the tales of knights and heroes, the rise and fall of empires. They’re less sanitized than the stories she grew up on - Kyphon and Loog may have killed the wicked, but there was much less mass decapitation going on back in the time of legend, apparently - and therefore a thousand times more interesting.

There are, she notices, quite a few knights who weren’t… born knights. Not in the sense that they were born to commoner families - though that’s not unheard of - but that they were born  _ women _ , physically. It feels like someone’s scratching at the back of her brain as she reads, flipping the pages so fast they almost tear once or twice. These knights would disguise their bodies under heavy plate mail on the battlefield, tightened bandages and a well-placed balled-up sock off of it. (She tries the sock thing in her room, once she’s sure everyone else is asleep and with her chair wedged underneath the door handle, but it just feels uncomfortable and she ends up throwing the damn thing in the fireplace to burn.) Some of them even searched out magical treatment for their condition, though the books don’t go into much detail about that. Some were open about their status, others hid it until after their death, when their bodies betrayed their births - she can’t think of anything more humiliating, she thinks with a shudder.

_ I wish that could be me _ , she thinks.  _ It would be so much easier if it were _ . The magical treatments, whatever they might be, sound especially enticing - if only someone could devise a spell to make the monthly nuisance she’s acquired that year go away. Some  _ gift _ , to walk around for days at a time feeling so deeply  _ wrong  _ deep in her body for a reason she can’t quite name. If only someone could fix the way she flinches away from mirrors still, surprised by the too-soft features staring back at her.

_ Why can’t it be? _ her mind answers back.

_ Because I’m a Fraldarius. Because there are certain things expected of me, as a daughter - because it’s not what I’m supposed to do. _

_ When, _ that little voices says,  _ have you ever let that stop you? _

<strike> **\--** </strike>

_ He. _

She -  _ he? _ \- lets the pronoun roll around in her -  _ his? _ \- head, like a marble. Back and forth, while she -  _ he? _ \- drags through every too-long day, the hours stretched into infinity by the never-ending thought of it.

_ The second son of Lord Fraldarius. _ It sounds so painfully right it makes his (her? No,  _ his _ ) chest ache. Which has to be a sign.

If it hurts, it’s probably the truth.

<strike> **\--** </strike>

“Hey,” he says to Sylvain during one of their increasingly-less-common visits. They’re sitting outside the back doors to the kitchen, fresh rolls in their hands steaming in the chill air - the kitchens are a flurry of activity, and they’ve been pushed out with a  _ take these and stay out of our hair _ \- and Sylvain’s heading back to Gautier territory in the morning, so - fuck it, this might be his best chance.

“Whahisi?” Sylvain says through a mouthful of bread, meaning,  _ what is it? _

“Can you…” He digs his fingers through the crust of the roll, watching it splinter as it gives way to the soft insides. “Can you call me Felix?”

_ Felix _ means  _ successful _ , apparently. Though that hadn’t factored into his final decision on the name. He likes the graceful way the F looks written in his sloping cursive. He likes the X at the end, like two crossed swords.

Sylvain swallows his bread, brow furrowed. “Felix is a weird name for a girl.” And then, because he’s not as stupid as he likes to let people believe, a second later. “Hold on, are you saying-”

“Don’t make a big deal of it,” Felix cuts him off, face reddening. “I told you first because you wouldn’t be all weird and sappy at me about it, so just… don’t.”

“Wait, you…” Sylvain grins. “You told me  _ first _ ? Before  _ Dima _ ? Aw, Felix, you really do like me after all, huh?”

(Dimitri absolutely would have been all  _ weird and sappy _ , if he’d been the first to know. He would have tried to hug Felix, probably teared up, told him how proud he is, as if Felix had done something more than a whole lot of thinking until his head hurt. Of  _ course  _ he’d told Sylvain first.)

“Ingrid’s gonna be so mad she’s got another idiot boy to look after,” Sylvain says, ruffling his hair, and Felix bats his hand away with a snarl, because he’s not an idiot but Sylvain sure is acting like one.

He doesn’t sigh with relief, not that Sylvain’s taken it all in stride and  _ certainly  _ not that it’s finally off his chest, no longer a secret shared between himself and the walls of his room at night when he’d whispered  _ my name is Felix _ , testing his tongue on the words.

He feels lighter anyway.

<strike> **\--** </strike>

He plans to tell Glenn when he and Rodrigue return from their current assignment guarding the royal family on their travels, but Glenn never returns to the Fraldarius home.

He’s not sure if he’s grateful, or infuriated, that his body burns away like so many others on the roads of Duscur. Those that hadn’t been consumed by the initial flames - Glenn among them - were too great in number to return to their families, not with military resources needed elsewhere; the survivors built pyres on their bodies, their ashes added to the smoke filling the skies. He’s not sure he could have sat through a proper funeral without screaming, but-

“It’s an honorable end,” Felix’s father says, turning the helm of Glenn’s armor over in his hands. He’s no longer relegated to waiting outside the lord’s meeting room, ear pressed to the wall, but it’s not due to the proper invitation he’s been waiting on for years - he simply doesn’t care enough, now, to have his remaining child removed. His grief for Glenn blinds him to all else. Including, Felix thinks, common  _ fucking  _ sense. “He left this world alongside his fellow soldiers - alongside his king. He died a true knight.”

Felix wants to know what’s honorable about your body burning in a pile of gore and viscera. What’s honorable about dying for  _ nothing _ , because laying down his life did nothing to save the royal family, to save Faerghus from war.

_ There’s no honor in death _ , he thinks. Any ideals of chivalry all those books might have given him burnt away to ashes with Glenn’s body.

The words feel like a knife in his gut, but worse - and how  _ selfish _ , he thinks, clenching his jaw so hard it hurts, to think it worse at all - is when he hears his father crying days later, on his knees inside the chapel as he passes by the door.

“--  _ my only son _ -”

Because as furious as he is with his father, what kind of child would correct him  _ now _ ?

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on [twitter](http://twitter.com/dimifeli)! come talk to me about this emotionally spiky boy.


End file.
